July 31, 2009 - Praying in the Tube

Finishing out my vacation, I’ve been enjoying some quiet time up at our Adirondacks place, near Jay, New York. One of the good books I’ve been reading is Why Faith Matters, by Rabbi David J. Wolpe. David thoughtfully sent me a copy of his book, after reading my May 9, 2009 blog entry about him.

The book has a lot to recommend it. It’s a thoughtful, honest answer to recent critics from the scientific world, like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, who have ridiculed faith and elevated scientific insights in its place. (It’s also a quick read, very accessible to people without extensive training in either theology or science.)

David is in the same place I am on that question, maintaining that religion and science need not be in conflict with one another. There’s no reason why a scientist cannot also be a religious believer, nor a believer someone who also accepts the insights of evolutionary biology or physics.

One part of the book that speaks personally to me is when David shares his personal experience as a cancer survivor. Like me, he has non-Hodgkin lymphoma, in an incurable form. Some years previously, he had surgery to remove a brain tumor. Here, he writes of his experience of prayer, as he’s undergone various medical tests:

“Throughout my various illnesses, I prayed. My prayer was not answered because I lived; my prayer was answered because I felt better able to cope with my sickness. Each time I go for my regular tests, the CT or PET scans or an MRI, each time I am moved into the metal tube that will give an image of sickness or health, I pray. I do not pray because I believe God will give me a clear scan. I pray because I am not alone, and from gratitude that having been near death I am still in life. I pray not for magic but for closeness, not for miracles but for love.

The novelist George Meredith wrote, ‘Who rises from his prayer a better man, his prayer is answered.’”

– Why Faith Matters (HarperOne, 2008), p. 25.

Some of the most heartfelt prayers any of us pray are those uttered “in the tube.” When we find ourselves in the tube, what do we pray for? Miracles?

I’ve wondered, on similar occasions, what the point is of praying for a negative test result (“negative” is, of course, a positive or good result in medical parlance). The machine, be it CT scanner or PET scanner or whatever, is simply taking a picture of whatever is there. I’m not praying for the result to come out skewed, of course – it’s in my best interest that the test be accurate, that my doctors fully understand whatever’s going on inside my body. When we offer prayers in the tube, are we praying that, if there’s a malignancy there, God will vaporize it then and there, in the few seconds before the picture is taken?

No, as David indicates, I think prayer is a good bit more complex than that. When we pray, we often do have specific results in mind, but more importantly, we’re seeking to be in communion with God, and perhaps also to feel a sense of solidarity with others who form the community of prayer. Indeed, we pray “not for magic but for closeness, not for miracles but for love.”

Of miracles, C.S. Lewis once wrote: “Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”

The point is, to catch that larger vision.

Prayer changes things. Prayer changes us.